Syria and the Debate Over America’s Decline

By C. J. Refsland on May 14, 2013 • ( 0 )

(By Dore Gold) According to a revealing report in The New York Times this past week, President Barack Obama went much further than he originally planned last August, when he issued “a red line” to the Syrian regime about its possible use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians. Obama’s warning, which came in answer to a question, was not part of a script that had been worked out ahead of time by his national security team. As a result, because of his unprepared remarks, according to the article, Washington is now caught in a trap, needing to respond forcefully once the Syrian Army has used chemical weapons, or otherwise badly compromising American credibility.

This challenge has emerged at a time when the image of the U.S. in the Middle East has been badly damaged already by the Syrian crisis. The Economist’s Lexington column entitled “Dithering over Syria” concludes in its current issue that “[E]xposed to the tough love of a less attentive America, other nations will have to think harder about their security.” With mounting reports pouring in every month of more Syrian civilians being killed, America’s standing already has been badly eroded, reigniting the argument over whether the U.S. can still be relied on as a global leader, when crises of this sort erupt.

It should be recalled that the Obama administration originally supported the NATO intervention in Libya to avoid this kind of scenario. It feared that Moammar Gadhafi’s forces were going to slaughter the Libyan rebels in Benghazi, along with much of its population. In Washington it was said the administration would have had a “Middle Eastern Srebrenica” on its hands, referring to the Bosnian village where Serbian forces murdered 7,000 Muslims in 1995, resulting in a major humanitarian intervention led by the Clinton administration. Presently, the number of civilians killed in Syria is ten times greater than Srebrenica.

The question about America’s standing that is now being asked in different parts of the world in light of the ongoing disaster in Syria does not come in a vacuum. Over the last five years there has been a vociferous debate raging in the West over the question of whether the U.S. is in decline as a great power. This has been partly an economic question. Many academics in the U.S. have been writing that the era of Western hegemony is coming to an end with the economic rise of China, Brazil, India and Russia.

Some commentators focus on the military dimension of U.S. power by lamenting the drop in combat ships in the U.S. Navy over the last 50 years from nearly 1,000 vessels to 270 or even less. In late April 2013 the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, admitted that the U.S. Navy had no aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. Countries like Israel need to closely watch the effects of the cuts in the U.S. defense budget, especially when they are accompanied by new defense policies like the strategic “pivot” of American power from the Middle East to the Pacific.

Some of this pessimism about the decline of America’s role in the world comes from internal U.S. official documents, like Global Trends 2030, prepared by the U.S. intelligence community. Many academics added their voices to the trends that it identified. The prestigious American journal, Foreign Policy, actually introduced a regular feature section in September 2011, called “Decline Watch,” to track the new conventional wisdom that the U.S. was declining while China and other Asian states were emerging as the new great powers.

A variation of the debate over American decline asks whether the U.S. has become objectively weaker or whether its policies project weakness. One of the most important books published this year in this regard is ironically entitled “Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat.” It was written by Vali Nasr, who served for two years in the Obama administration, where he dealt with Afghanistan and Pakistan, but was exposed to the internal debates over Iran and the Middle East as well. He is the dean of the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Professor Nasr’s book describes an America that is tired and has lost the desire to serve as a global leader. His problem with the Obama administration is not the reduction of the size of its armed forces, but rather the wisdom of its foreign policy. Looking back at how it handled the withdrawal from Iraq, he reviews how the administration backed Nouri al-Maliki to become its prime minister, even though he was a Shiite leader with a checkered history, who received the written support for his candidacy from no less than Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in December 2010.

Pro-American Iraqi politicians quickly learned that the U.S. did not want to leave forces behind, but preferred a full withdrawal instead, strengthening Iran’s hand in Baghdad. Over time, Maliki became an authoritarian strong man, centralizing all power by becoming prime minister, defense minister and interior minister. Nasr unveils how Washington had misjudged Maliki’s ties to Tehran.

Nasr’s analysis is revealing on the peace process, as well. He explains how Obama misread the Arab world during his first term in office: “Publicly Arab rulers pressed him on Palestine, but privately all they wanted to talk about was defanging Iran …” Nasr then tells about the first meeting between Obama and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah in June 2009, which he describes as a “royal lecture” on the Iranian threat: “the Saudi king wanted America to fix the Iranian problem, not the Palestinian one …” King Abdullah opposed any diplomatic linkage between the Iranian issue and the Palestinian question: “in that the King and Netanyahu were on the same page.”

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